VentureBeat

Public details have been scant about the social search product from The Mechanical Zoo, a company chock full of former Googlers that just announced it raised $6 million from August Capital and Baseline Ventures. But for the last three months, I’ve actually been a beta tester for the company’s first product, Aardvark.im.

It’s one of the best web applications I’ve seen during my year with VentureBeat.

The simplest explanation is Yahoo Answers meets Twitter — real-time, rapid fire responses, by actual human beings, to intelligent (and not-so-intelligent) questions. It helps you find answers that are too complicated, even for Google’s search algorithms.

This is very different than the brouhaha of expectations crafted for search engines Cuil and Powerset. Why? Cuil wants to index more pages with better and more relevant results, and Powerset (which was purchased by Microsoft for more than $100 million) attempted to improve results with its natural language processing. Aardvark, on the other hand, takes the cake because it doesn’t try to use artificial intelligence to match a question with an answer. Instead, it uses its advanced algorithms to match the question with a number of people who can answer the question.

Essentially, when a user sends a question to Aardvark (via email or instant message), the service analyzes the question and categorizes it, then distributes the question to those who have self-appointed domain knowledge in that category, who can then respond while retaining some level of anonymity.

Other users who receive the question can either answer it directly, pass the question on, or even request to receive all answers. Where Aardvark gets social is that for every user who answers your questions (or vice versa), it creates a social connection and adds that person to your graph. Also, you can specify that you trust certain friends for certain categories.

For example, I might say that I trust VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon for information on “Oregon” or “Facebook” or “Politics.” That way, when I send a question to Aardvark, it will first check against my existing social graph to see if one of my friends/connections is an expert in the relevant category. I can also self-appoint myself in categories, perhaps “college football” or “foreign languages” or “music technology,” and Aardvark will send me questions about those categories, in addition to my previously listed interests that I filled in upon signing up. The initial interests can be imported directly from your Facebook profile, while the categories you’d like to answer are up to the user.

In the example below, you can see that I sent an email to Aardvark about finding housing in Hollywood, Calif. Aardvark then responded with an automated note to let me know it has received the question.

Later, I received a response from Ethan, a 28-year-old male from LA, with a suggestion on location and pricing.

The second screenshot is a snippet of my profile at the aardvark.im web page. I can of course see and edit my personal profile, but also see a history of the questions I’ve asked and the answers I received. I can see that I am connected with Ethan, who invited me to the Aardvark service. Ethan’s already answered questions about concerts in Los Angeles, and the profile reads that he knows a lot about music sites and indie music. I trust Ethan for questions on Los Angeles and the music business.

Why is this so important?

First, let’s analyze how some people use web darling Twitter.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson writes on his blog:

And of course, Twitter is huge when you are on the road. I got advice on coffee in Paddington Station, where to get a U.K. blackberry charger, and a host of other suggestions on life in Paris via friends and followers on Twitter on this trip.

Fred has more than 7,000 users on Twitter, I have barely 200 followers — but with Aardvark it not only evens the playing field, but opens the possibility of much, much more because of the network effect: The more users on Aardvark (there are currently more than 1,500 testing the beta), the more knowledge is available, and the faster the response.

Aardvark brings that power to the masses, and it leverages the collective intelligence (like Yahoo Answers) in real-time (like Twitter) without restricting you to just your followers.

And you don’t have to worry about spammers.

Despite being quite powerful, the service still has its faults (after all, it is in beta testing). You can’t search and view other users’ questions/answers on Aardvark –but this is something that should be available when the site is public. Also, while I like the idea of social connections, I could easily recognize other users on the platform just by first name, last initial and location. Ivan K. from Boston, is Ivan Kirigin, one of the founders of TipJoy (I e-mailed back to verify). As a safeguard for privacy, I might not want every question I ask tied to my account/user name.

I asked Rob Spiro, part of Mechanical Zoo’s research team, about this issue, and he replied:

You’ll see more about the people you’re interacting with, you’ll see how you’re connected socially. The routing algorithm will start favoring friends-of-friends, which is a very cool experience. It may be a strange transition for our existing users, but ultimately we’re confident it will lead to better, faster answers with more credibility.

You make a great point that as we get more open, we need to accommodate the questions that you don’t want tied to your identity. We’ll build features to support those questions — specifically the ability to ask on someone else’s behalf, and potentially the ability to ask anonymously.

It might make sense to add a delicious-like “do not share” feature that will automatically make any question asked (or answer given) anonymous and not tied to a user’s account.

Finally, the service’s biggest challenge is how to get user adoption. Creating incentives for people to provide information — to give, and not just take — is something that may or may not be prohibitively expensive, depending on how smart the company is in generating good will among its community. Will there be enough fanatical users of the service to answer everyone’s questions for free?

Overall, I think this is a phenomenal service, and is one of the best technologies/applications I’ve seen in a long, long time. There’s a good reason why Marissa Mayer of Google praised social search — it’s one of the natural evolutions of search. Aardvark.im is much more effective than Google’s search in a plethora of situations.

And it will most likely have the same initial business model — search-based text ads.

The Mechanical Zoo, a social search startup founded by a team of former Google employees, has raised $6 million in a first round of funding.

Like many other companies, such as Delver and AskMeGo, The Mechanical Zoo says it’s trying to tailor web search results to personal tastes by tapping into a user’s “social graph”. What does that actually mean? As the company puts it, the service will help users “identify the right person, among the tens of thousands in [their] extended network, to answer a particular question.”

So is there any reason to think The Mechanical Zoo will stand out from the pack? Well, there’s the pedigree — the founding team consists of Nathan Stoll, former product lead at Google News, as well Max Ventilla, formerly of Google business development, and Damon Horowitz, former lead engineer at early search company Perspecta. A star team doesn’t guarantee a knockout product, however, as we saw with search startup Cuil. Also, you know who has a really strong team of Googlers? Google. And Google’s Marissa Mayer has told us that social search is the future.

On the other hand, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reports that the response to the company’s private beta test has been wildly enthusiastic.

The funding was led by August Capital, with participation from Baseline Ventures and undisclosed angel investors.

A new startup called HourTown is entering the crowded market for scheduling websites, and it just raised $1 million to improve its product and promotion.

We’ve been a bit skeptical about whether companies can get much traction in this area, even if they offer a smart, simple interface like newcomer Presdo. But HourTown targets a different audience, because it focuses on helping service providers — basically, small businesses ranging from doctors to yoga instructors — schedule their appointments, and also promotes the businesses and specific openings through search engine marketing.

It’s a combination that makes sense. In my experience, I’ve found that I usually Google whatever service I need, visit the website and then I have to pick up the phone to actually make the appointment — not exactly arduous, but not ideal, either. Palo Alto, Calif.-based HourTown allows businesses to bring that whole process online for much less effort than building their own appointment tools on their webistes. With a basic version that costs only $20 per month, HourTown probably pays off in saved time alone.

Since launching in April, founder Ryan Donahue (who left PayPal to start the company in 2006) says HourTown has processed 40,000 bookings. One of the next steps is adding mobile compatibility for businesses that do most of their work remotely, such as pet grooming services or pool cleaners.

The funding comes from Baseline Ventures, Hatch Ventures, NBC Universal and several angel investors. ZocDoc, which provides a similar service but focuses on doctors’ appointments, announced a $3 million first round yesterday.

There already plenty of ways to share and edit documents online, but a startup called DocVerse may be preparing a better solution. The stealthy San Francisco company recently raised $1.3 million from Baseline Ventures, Michael Dearing and undisclosed angel investors.

John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer first reported the funding, which VentureWire also confirmed. Co-founder Shan Sinha told Cook that DocVerse “will help people collaborate with others on documents more easily and effectively than anything available today.” That’s big talk, and since the company’s tool is still in private testing mode, I can’t say whether it holds any water. But Sinha and his co-founder Alex DeNeui have credibility and experience, since they’re both former managers with Sharepoint, Microsoft’s collaborative tool. The DocVerse Web site also lists Microsoft as one of the company’s advisors.

Now, the free offering Google Docs makes life much easier for the VentureBeat team to work with and edit each other remotely. But Docs definitely has its roots with the consumer audience, not the entepterprise customer base that it’s starting to targeting, and I still run into occasional bugs. Plus, DocVerse says it will offer some cool new features, including the ability to send and receive faxes, and also to collaborate using existing tools like Microsoft Outlook and Word, rather than forcing you to adapt to a new application.

updated
Sendori, a Silicon Valley based company that lets you bid for traffic from other Web sites, has raised an undisclosed first round of venture capital.

The site operates in an industry that has so far been quite shady, and it’s an improvement over some past practices. The funding news was first reported by Venturewire and SiliconTap (subscriptions required).

Here’s how it works. I might own Gamespot.com, but I’d also like to draw traffic from other sites, such as VideoGames.com, or Reviewsgames.com, which are domains that aren’t being used, but which may draw traffic from users not knowing any better. (The users typically get to one of those sites by typing in “VideoGames” in their browser, for example, without knowing if there’s anything there.) I can go to Sendori, and bid to get traffic from those sites. I must bid higher than anyone else to get it. By drawing the users to my site, I get more business.

Sendori sets the bids on a cost-per-visitor basis. The company claims that domain owners can see a 25 percent boost in revenues compared to other approaches, such as Google’s AdSense.

As mentioned, the domain name business has had a dicey reputation. It’s not uncommon to be redirected to a mal-ware infected site if you type in the wrong domain name (something that a separate Silicon Valley company, OpenDNS is trying to prevent). However, by creating a marketplace of quality advertisers, this should help minimize the problems.

On its face, the Sendori system doesn’t seem to require much technological sophistication. Yet, the company is trying to secure a patent on its process. Some of the technology elements include geotargeted redirects and click-fraud blocking.

Sendori is, however, targeting a crowded market segment. Take a look at public company Marchex, which is a leading domain name aggregator (with a portfolio of over 100,000 domains). In its latest quarterly report, the company posted revenues of $33.5 million.

Another major player is Demand Media, which recently raised $100 million from Goldman Sachs.

Sendori’s venture round included investors First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, Maples Investments and Felicis Ventures.

Update from an interview with founder Ofer Ronen: Ronen got the idea for Sendori at the MBA program at Cornell . He teamed up with classmate Dave Weldon.

By December 2006, Ronen was able to raise some angel funding. It helped that he already had a start-up under his belt: Karanga (a B2B e-commerce site).

The old approach was to setup an intermediate landing page for when a user types in a domain name. Sendori’s approach is to send users directly to advertisers who want to get the traffic. This lowered costs and improved targeting, he said. To see an example of this, click the following: www.austrianstamp.com. As you can see, it takes you to a specific page on eBay.

Sendori’s platform aggregates about 33 million visitors per month, Ronen said, noting that national advertisers want “volume.”

Cake Financial is a new service for helping any stock market investor better manage their own performance.

The San Francisco company lets you import all of your financial data from online brokerage firms into your Cake profile, then compare your performance against other investors using the service.

Cake shows you the historical performance of your portfolio going back as far as ten years, as well as monthly and yearly performance data. You can compare yourself versus friends and family, as well as against stock indexes, or against top investors on Cake.

The service hides each individuals’ net worth, number of shares owned, and other data. You can only see what stocks people have invested in, and when, and how those individuals have performed versus the market. If desired, you can use a fake user name to disguise your identity. (See screenshot below.)

Hedge funds and mutual funds don’t normally provide this level of data analysis; hedge funds also report quarterly results a quarter later. Cake data is live, and lets you import from established sites such as E-Trade or Charles Schwab.

You can also choose to follow other investors, and see what they’re buying and selling from when you log in. Even in testing, the site is already revealing top investors — some of whom didn’t know they were better than their peers until using Cake, the company tells us.

A wide range of other features let you search for and follow users based on strategies, industries and other factors.

Recent studies, such as this one (pdf) by the Harvard Business School, have concluded that especially skillful individuals take advantage of “market inefficiencies” to make more money than everyone else.

Less-stellar investors are already learning from outstanding individuals on Cake, the company says — notably recognizing how a lack of diversity in their portfolios exposes them to extra risk.

So why would top investors join, and let Cake show others their strategies? Bragging rights and public affirmation, of course. Many Cake users are savvy enough at investing that they’re already handling investments for family members and friends, the company says.

Other sites, like Stockpickr, let users pick stocks they would invest in — a different concept from comparing real investments between established individual investors.
Investors include Alsop Louie Partners, Ron Conway/Baseline Ventures and others.

Screenshot of public rankings of investors on the site: